Google Overhauls Product Search, Plans To Close Boutiques.com

It’s dominated by an oversized image area that changes through a series of five different products. There are short text descriptions for each on the left of the images, and then a couple rows of featured products below the fold. It looks like an actual major department store website.

(Mind you, there’s extremely little text on the page, so if you’re an online retailer, this would not be considered “best practices” when it comes to retail SEO. But it’s certainly much prettier than most Google product home pages, for what it’s worth.)

But that’s just one change. Google also explains that deeper pages are being redesigned, too. It begins with the apparel category, where images are larger and new options such as searching by color, silhouette and genre are available. There’s also a a “visually similar” search that will show apparel from other designers that closely resemble an item that the searcher is viewing.

Google says that these changes mirror what’s available on the Boutiques.com shopping site that Google launched almost a year ago. In fact, the company says it’s planning to close Boutiques.com as of October 14 and redirect shoppers to the new Google Product Search. Users of Boutiques.com should get an email soon with details about saving data before the switch takes place.

About The Author

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.